SURFACE TENSION
An evening on… frictions
Friday 19 March 2010, 20:00. Vooruit, Gent.
Program produced by Courtisane as part of the Courtisane Festival 2010 (Gent, 17 – 21 March 2010)
What happens when, before our eyes and ears, an event unfolds in time without simple representation, causality or possibility of identification? We are thrown back upon ourselves, upon the power of our imagination to create mental images. The real is brought back to the possible. In this series of works, most points of reference and information have been reduced to the minimum, as if the outside was folded inside. It’s up to us to break through the surface, to put our imagination to work, to search for connections, to discover what it all can mean…
PERFORMANCE
Seymour Wright, Ross Lambert, Paul Abbott
alto-saxophone, guitar/devices, electronics/light/projections.
An encounter between three participants of the weekly workshop led by musician and theorist Eddie Prévost, which during the past decade has left an undeniable mark on the London improvisation scene. The emphasis that Prévost places on the heuristic aspect of free improvisation – as a process of discovery, learning and dialogue – lies close to the heart of these musicians. Both saxophonist Seymour Wright and guitarist Ross Lambert are known for their inter-musical dynamics and exploratory drive. On this occasion, they team up with Paul Abbott, who will focus on working with light and video projections.
PERFORMANCE
Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, David Cunningham
The Space Between. Video projections, guitar
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler make film and video installations and performances that question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. The Space Between brings together a formal approach with an overtly social subject matter. The images of an anonymous housing block in India are the basis for an exploration of a number of “spaces between”, suggested by the motif and its distance from the Western viewer. The complexity of the visual structure, a two-screen projection, will be reflected in the live soundtrack by David Cunningham, who has made a name for himself as an installation artist and musician, often in collaboration with This Heat, David Toop, Martin Creed and Sam Taylor-Wood.
PERFORMANCE
Dominique Petitgand
Séance d’écoute. 1992 – 2009, pièces sonores, parlées, musicales et silencieuses
Voice is central to Dominique Petitgand’s compositions and installations. Sentences are fragmented, words and other articulations are isolated and assembled into “mental landscapes”. The listener is immersed into micro universes that bounce back and forth between an assumption of reality – the recordings in which people speak of their own lives – and a projected and timeless fiction. “For me, the search for form takes place at the level of perception, at the level of what is going on inside the head of the listener. I don’t have the impression of creating an object; rather, I set in motion mental perceptions, acts of reflection, of thinking, memory and imagination.” At the request of Courtisane, he will present a listening session in the dark, structured around silences.
INSTALLATION
Lis Rhodes
Light Music. 1975, 16mm 2 screen, b&w, optical sound, 25’
The work of Lis Rhodes is pivotal in the history of British avant-garde film, but in the past decades has also moved on to photography, performance and political analysis. Light Music is one of her earlier explorations in the field of “expanded cinema”. Two 16mm projectors project a varied configuration of straight lines, in which the spacing (frequency), thickness (amplitude), colour and density (tonality) also determine the soundtrack. “It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music, It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship.”